Bash Listing Files in a Directory and Testing whether Specific Files Exist in Directories

Internal

• bash

Overview

To list files:

local dir=...

for f in ${dir}/*; do
  [[ -f ${f} ]] && echo -n "$(basename ${f}) "
done

To list directories, replace -f with -d.

Note that if ${dir} does not exist, or if it exists and there are no files in that directory, f is resolved to the literal "dirname/*".

Multiple directories:

for f in t/master-* t/worker-*; do
    [[ -f ${f} ]] && { rm ${f} && info "deleted ${f}" || warn "failed to delete ${f}"; }
done

Variations

find: To further research, it seems the following approach does not work because if there is more than one directory, the first iteration assigns a multi-line to d:

for d in $(find ${dir} -name "*-something" -type d); do
  debug "d: ${d}"
  ...
done

ls: Same for ls, $(ls ...) produces multi-line output.go